1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to cluster computing systems. More particularly, the present invention relates to systems and methods for providing heartbeat check using remote mirroring technologies.
2. Related Art
We are witnessing today an increased demand for online services. One solution, recently implemented and already widely spread that allows for increasing the availability of online services is clustering multi-site systems. However, even within a multi-site cluster the heartbeat signals and their send/receive methods are carried out on TCP/IP links. This feature of the multi-site cluster proves to be unstable and implicitly renders unstable the overall availability of service and the quality of online services provided by the multi-site systems.
In case of network failure, the times between the network failure and service recovery must be as short as possible. In practice, the time necessary to confirm the failure and to start the failover process has proven to be long. One reason is the lack of stability in the network links, which, as mentioned above, are still provided by a clustered network over TCP/IP.
In case of disaster, network administrators need robust mechanisms for disaster recovery, especially for the recovery of multi-site network environments and for instances when volume migration is needed between the sites. Big users, such as banking, brokerage, and insurance companies, that have many data centers scattered worldwide, have to manage multi-sites and to check operability of service at each of those sites, often during short periods of time. They need both network robustness and fast failover in case of network failure.
What are needed are robust ways of transmitting heartbeat signals and performing the send/receive methods within the cluster multi-site system. Also, what are needed are robust heartbeat link methods through robust remote mirroring links, such as ESCON, FibreChannel, telecom lines or a combination thereof.